Arkansas Blog

Almost here

The lottery rolls on. The lottery commission is meeting this afternoon to discuss, among other things, getting a problem gambling program up and running by the Sept. 28 start date. Representatives from the Department of Human Services were on hand to discuss how that program is coming along. DHS officials said they will use the national hotline when the games begin. Problem gamblers can call a number found on the back of each ticket. Those calls will then be rolled over to a call center in Louisiana where staff will connect that person to the appropriate treatment center in Arkansas. $200,000 was set aside for such a program in the lottery bill passed by the state legislature. DHS said there were other plans under development, including establishing a problem gambling website, developing evaluation tools to measure outcomes and institute an education and prevention curriculum.

In other news, the commission had some sample scratch-off tickets on hand today. One of the games is pictured above. Sorry for the quality, but all I had was the video camera. What you see is a still. Capsearch is a-Twitter.